Artist of the Week: Barbara Landes

Posted onJanuary 5, 2010

Happy New Year! Thank you to everyone who advocated for the release by the State of New Jersey of 2010 funding to the arts community. As a result of our collective voices, led by ArtPride, we understand that the previously frozen funding is or will be on its way to the many organizations who so richly support our cultural life throughout the State.

Continuing our Tuesday “Artist of the Week” series highlighting New Jersey artists, we are pleased today to feature Barbara Landes.

“My works begin as sodden paper pulp in a papermaking studio. I use pulp painting, inserts, blowouts and any other technique I can think of to make the paper a compelling collaborator with the printmaking techniques to come rather than a passive ground for them.

There are no neat borders to keep the viewer at arms’ length. The paper competes for open space with distinct and separate printmaking elements. Physically, the works are vulnerable and immediate while their formal, visual impact reaches for universal themes of life in flux where the way may be simple, uncertain or blocked, but can come into perfect clarity for a moment.

In “Flying Colors in an Unknown Space,” crisp tarnished criss-crossing hovers like a grate above a broad black mark. Below the image gives way to an ethereally lit and deep space behind wavy yellow lines of pulp paint. The entwined orange and blue graphic device links these two places.”

Flying Colors in an Unknown Space is a part of the From Here . . . To There exhibit currently on display at the Arts Council of the Morris Area’s14 Maple Gallery located at 14 Maple Avenue (3rd floor), Morristown, New Jersey. Gallery hours are M-Th, 10 a.m – 4 p.m.; F, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. Inquires regarding the purchase of this work may be directed to Anne Dodd at (973) 285-5115, x 15, or adodd@morrisarts.org.